Finding the Worm (24 page)

Even so, it was pretty decent of Devlin to say that stuff. I’ve had a full day to think it over, and I could’ve at least shaken his hand. I
should’ve
shaken his hand. I should’ve let him off the hook. I mean, he was trying to do the right thing. Even if he was trying to do the right thing only because he was feeling guilty and low, it was still the right thing. You can’t expect a guy to be better than he is.

What I don’t get is why Rabbi Salzberg expects
me
to be better than I am. There’s no reason I should know what I know. There’s no reason he should’ve told me. Why couldn’t he keep it to himself? It’s too much to carry around.

It’s like I had a life, and maybe it wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough for me, and now my life is knowing
what I know. I wake up knowing it, and I walk around knowing it, and I go to sleep knowing it. I even dream about it, but in a backward way. I go to sleep knowing it, but then I wake up, and I realize Quentin’s going to be all right—except I only woke up in my dream, and then I wake up again, for real, and I know the truth again, and it weighs down on me like it did the moment I first found out.

But the worst part of it is I can’t look Quentin in the eye. If Rabbi Salzberg told me because he thought I’d spend more time with Quentin, or he thought I’d be thankful for the time we had left, he couldn’t have been more wrong. I can hardly bear to look at the guy. There, I said it! I love him, I really and truly love him, but I can hardly bear to look at him. The sight of him in that wheelchair … it makes me sick, knowing what I know, knowing he’s not going to be all right, knowing he’s never—

But what’s the point of talking about it?

Today is April Fool’s Day, so of course
today was the day we got the news about Bobby Murcer’s visit to Thirty-Fourth Avenue. Quentin’s dad was still on the phone with the Yankees when Eric and I showed up in the morning to take Quentin to the bus stop.

“Thanks a million, Jerry,” was what Mr. Selig said before he hung up.

Then he told us the news: Bobby Murcer will be here next Wednesday at four o’clock.

I almost wish it were a joke. But Bobby Murcer, my favorite baseball player,
will
be here a week from today, and of course he’ll act real cheerful, on account of he thinks he’s Quentin’s favorite player, except he’s not, and
on account of he thinks Quentin is getting better, except he’s not. So if you stop and think about it, the whole thing
is
just one big joke.

Except it’s not.

That was as far as I’d gotten when Amelia knocked on my bedroom door. I wasn’t planning to write anything else tonight. What else is there to say? Right or wrong, I’m going to meet Bobby Murcer next week. The cards are dealt. There’s nothing to do except play out the hand.

When Amelia knocked on the door, I closed my notebook and shoved it under a pile of schoolwork on my desk. I told her to come in since I knew, from the way she’d knocked, she wasn’t going to go away. Usually, she just bangs a couple of times with the underside of her fist. But this time she gave the door six quick raps with her knuckle. It was her
I’m-not-going-away-so-you-might-as-well-let-me-in
knock.

She pushed open the door and said, “You want to tell me what’s bugging you?”

I spun around in my desk chair. “Nothing’s bugging me. What’s bugging you?”

“Something’s definitely bugging you, Jules. Even Mom and Dad have noticed.”

“So you’re their spy?” I asked.

“No, I’m your sister.”

“I never knew that. What a coincidence!”

“Jules—”

“I’m glad we got that straightened out.”

She came into the room and sat down on the bed. I spun the rest of the way around in my chair to keep eye contact.

“Look, Jules, if you don’t want to talk to me, that’s fine. I know you’ve got your own life, and you’ve got your own way of looking at things, and if you tell me to butt out, I’ll butt out—”

“Then butt out.”

“I knew you were going to say that,” she said. “But before I butt out, I just want to let you know that it doesn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t have to be any way. You can talk to me, and I’ll think about what you tell me—and, if you want, I’ll tell you what I think. I’ll take it seriously, and it’ll stay between the two of us. Mom and Dad don’t have to know.”

“Is that it?”

“Look,” she said, “whatever’s going on, it’ll pass.”

“You’re real sure about that?”

“Yes, I am. If Lonnie’s giving you a hard time—”

I started to shake my head. “You figured it out.”

“Whether it’s Lonnie or not is irrelevant. All I’m saying is that it’s going to pass.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you’re thirteen years old,” she said. “I know you don’t want to hear that, and I know it sounds like an insult. But it happens to be true. The things that seem like life and death when you’re thirteen—sooner or later, you’ll realize they’re not life and death.”

“You’re right.”

“What?”

“I’m thirteen years old,” I said. “Whatever it is, how bad could it be?”

“That’s right,” she said.

“That’s a huge relief, Amelia. I’m real glad we had this conversation.”

She looked at me in a weird way. “So am I.”

With that, she stood up and walked out of the room.

I turned back to the desk, pulled out my notebook, and read back the last couple of paragraphs I’d written. Nothing else came to me, so for five minutes straight I just stared at the last three words: “Except it’s not.”

Then Amelia knocked on the door again and pushed it open. Her face was pale and her mouth was half open. She said in a low voice, almost a whisper, “Unless it
is
life and death.”

I just stared at her. I didn’t speak.

“Oh no,” she muttered. “Oh God.”

I was close to bawling, but I fought it off. “I’m just thirteen, right?”

“Julian—”

“Don’t make me say anything else.”

“But how do you—”

“Please,” I said. “Just let it go.”

“But Mom and Dad—”

“I’m begging you, Amelia.…”

There were tears running down her face. She swallowed hard, then wiped her eyes. Then she turned and left. She closed the door real soft behind her, and I went back to my notebook.

I found a note in my coat pocket when
I got to school. It was from Howie. He must have slipped it in there during the bus ride this morning.

I read the note a couple of times, then tore it up and threw it out. What else could I do? Telling on Howie wasn’t going to get me off the hook with Principal Salvatore. That much I knew for sure.

When I saw Howie over lunch, I walked around the table and whispered in his ear that I wasn’t mad. He looked up at me in a grateful way. Then he gave me a soft punch in the shoulder, which was his way of saying things were back to normal between us.

The rest of the guys gave us a quick look. It must’ve seemed like a strange thing, with me whispering to Howie and then Howie punching me. But a second later, they went back to their lunches, and I walked back around to my usual side of the table and sat down next to Lonnie.

Here’s the last essay, the first real
essay, on good citizenship I wrote for Principal Salvatore:

I slid the paper under the door to Principal Salvatore’s office, as usual, and then limped upstairs to homeroom.

Half an hour later, after old Mrs. Griff had finished her slow-motion list of morning reminders, Miss Medina
was waiting for me in the hall outside the classroom. She pulled me aside as I walked out with Beverly, and she handed me back the essay I’d written. Principal Salvatore had written on the back:

Miss Medina stood there while I read Principal Salvatore’s note. When I looked up afterward, she leaned over and said in my ear, “Congratulations.” Then she turned and walked off.

Beverly was waiting for me at the end of the hall, next to the stairwell. When I caught up to her, she asked, “What was that about?”

“Eighth grade,” I said. “I can skip it.”

“So all’s well that ends well, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Then why are you still sad?”

“Please, Beverly …”

“Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve just got a lot of stuff to think about.”

I glanced in both directions. No one was paying attention to us, so I gave her a quick kiss on the lips. She smiled at me afterward. “If you ever want to talk about the stuff you’re thinking about …”

“I know,” I said.

Bobby Murcer’s real first name is Bobby:
Bobby Ray Murcer. That’s how he got to be my favorite baseball player. Which is a dumb reason, if you stop and think about it. But you latch on to things for dumb reasons when you’re eight, and that’s how old I was when I first heard of Bobby Murcer.

He was going to be the next Mickey Mantle. That was what my dad said, which made me remember the name, since my dad also said (pretty much every time a Yankee game came on TV) that Mickey Mantle was the greatest player he’d ever seen, and would’ve been the greatest player who ever lived, except he wrecked his knees, but I should still keep an eye on him, even though he was
hobbling around, because greatness doesn’t come along too often, and because one day I’d be telling my grandchildren that I’d seen the great Mickey Mantle.

Mickey Mantle did nothing for me.

The
next
Mickey Mantle, on the other hand, seemed like he was worth getting to know. So back then, when I was eight, I fished out Bobby Murcer’s baseball card from the shoe box under my bed, and there he was, squinting back at me, holding a bat over his left shoulder, paired up with another Yankee rookie named Dooley Womack—which had to be the worst name I’d ever heard.

But what cinched it, what made him
my guy
, was when I turned the card over and found out Bobby Murcer’s real first name was Bobby. Not Robert. Bobby. I mean, who names their kid Bobby? Bobby is what you’re called, not what you’re named. (Bobby Kennedy’s real name, for instance, was Robert Francis Kennedy.) Except the more I stared at Murcer’s face, the more I realized he
had
to be a Bobby. His face was round, like a lemon, and even though he looked real serious, squinting back at me, waiting for the pitch, I could tell, whether he struck out on three pitches or slugged a home run, he was going to trot off the field smiling.

That
was the guy who pulled up in front of the Hampshire House at four o’clock. He was right on time, riding in a pin-striped blue limousine with a Yankees logo on the
side door. We were lined up at the edge of the sidewalk. Quentin was in the middle of us, sitting in his wheelchair. We’d had just enough time to get Quentin off the bus, rush him home, rush back home ourselves, change out of our school clothes, grab our baseball gloves, rush back to Quentin’s house, and then line up at the edge of the sidewalk outside the Hampshire House.

Jerry Manche was driving the limousine, and he hopped out first. Then he rushed around to the passenger side to open the door for Bobby Murcer, like it was supposed to be a big ceremony, but Murcer had already pushed open the door and climbed out by himself. He was wearing a suit and a tie, which looked weird. But his face looked just like his baseball card, except his hair was curled over his ears and a couple of inches longer in the back.